So long and goodnight
by Lilys Eyes
Summary: True love lasts forever, life however does not and that's how it should be, Wednesday finds. Oneshot. Major character death!


The rain is pouring down like a river of tears, they`d be soaked to the skin before they`d even have reached the gravesite…good. That was how it should be, her parents deserved no less. Wednesday sighs softly to herself, the grey, looming clouds shrouding the sky only adding to her bittersweet melancholy. Leaning against the window, she lets her breath fog up the pane a little and draws a small coffin with her finger, like she`d sometimes done when she was a child. The past few days have seen her quite frequently reminisce about her wonderfully horrible childhood. The laughter, the love, the sweet, sweet sorrow.

How she`d gleefully hurl herself from her doting mother`s lap onto the rough floorboards of her nursery as a toddler, or the homey, acrid smell of her father`s ever-present cigar when he tenderly kissed her goodnight. Her mother reading to her and Pugsley from the _Encyclopedia of unsolved Crimes_ in front of the fireplace on Christmas eve, or her father helping her hide dynamite in Granny`s bowl of thornflakes one Halloween, when she`d been still too small to reach the big box of explosives that always sat in the kitchen cupboard, right behind the teacups. Just a few of so many precious memories.

It was almost hard to believe that now the day had come for her to bid her parents a last and final farewell. Even though she was the one responsible for it. Wednesday sighs again and glances down at her hands that are clasped in front of her, on the silver and ruby ring there. 178 years of married bliss her parents had been granted, and although she and Joel have been together a mere thirteen, she is hopeful that their union will prove to be just as enduring and devastating. Again, in her heart, Wednesday thanks her parents for teaching her by example to believe in the power of love and romance and blackmail.

With her strict but loving guidance, Joel had proven himself to be a husband worthy of an Addams. It was quite fitting that her first love too should have turned out to be her only as well.

"One day, my darling, you`ll hear a man emit a sound so heart wrenching, so stomach turning and nerve racking, you`ll simply know," Her mother had once said to her. And then Thing had shot out of the disturbed soil of that grave and Joel had yelled hysterically and Wednesday had simply known, even back then.

"Merci, ma chere maman," she whispers.

Behind her there is a soft knock on the doorframe.

"They`re ready now, my love," Joel says somberly, trying to pull a few oleander leaves out of little Omertà `s mouth, who`d been happily munching on them from almost the second the first wreath had arrived.

"So am I," Wednesday nods," Let`s go, shall we."

Hand in hand, their daughter between them, they follow the narrow, winding path to what is going to be her parents` final resting place. The pale winter sun has already begun to set, illuminating the rain, falling like a shower of knitting needles, with it`s grey, dying light and Wednesday can`t stop the tears from welling up in her eyes as she sees the rows upon rows of torch-bearing Addams,` lining the black, gaping hole in the ground. Swiftly she blinks them away. This isn`t about her.

"Don`t be so hard on yourself, my love, this is your work," Joel whispers comfortingly," You`ve earned yourself a few proud tears."

Proud tears like she had seen them in her father`s eyes on the day he`d given her away at the altar, like her mother had shed them when she`d first held her granddaughter. She`d cried so hard, her tears had almost extinguished the fire Omertà had set to her sleeve, Wednesday remembers fondly.

Dabbing at her eyes with one of her mother`s lacy black handkerchiefs, she and her husband and their daughter take their places at the foot of the open grave. Pugsley gives them all a little wave when he spots them, the cadaverous-looking girl he is handcuffed to, limply waving with him. For a moment there is complete silence, then a murmur begins to travel through the crowd.

"The coffin… the coffin…oh, how wonderfully depressing."

To gasps of admiration, six pitch black horses draw the elegant glass and ebony hearse right up to the grave, and several members of the crowd silently step forward to relieve it of its burden. Only one coffin in which her parents now embrace each other for all eternity, as they`d done so often in life. And what a harrowingly happy life it had been, long and gloomy and fulfilled, like a never-ending, rainy afternoon that now had turned endless, welcoming night. Her parents had seen her following in her father`s footsteps to study law, and fail even more grandly than he had, had seen Pugsley become a morgue attendant, had witnessed the birth of their first grandchild and then again had seen Pugsley become a morgue attendant, this time at a different morgue, and then at another and another.

They had waltzed through a thousand nights and kissed under a full moon and made the walls of their mansion reverberate with each others cries. For 178 years they had been each others` treasure and torment, pleasure and pain. Two lives so closely entwined, they could only end together.

And Wednesday had considered it her sacred duty to do just that before it was too late. Before time would crush them under its boot and turn them into withered shells, housing still too alive spirits. Crippled by a passion they could still feel, yet no longer express. Before time would steal one of them away and condemn the other to hell on earth. Her parents had not been cut out to experience the kind of life Granny had lived. There would have been nothing for them that could have filled the void the other would have left. Tenderly Wednesday kisses the coffin`s smooth mahogany, before it begins its descend into the waiting earth.

She had drawn on her extensive knowledge of poisons to accomplish the deed. Only the best had been good enough. Arsenic, Belladonna and Hemlock, Mandrake, Strychnine and Cyanide and that had been the mere basis mixture. In the end she had composed a poison that had united the traditional with the new, the past with the future. Black and billowy it had spread through the red wine she had served her parents when they`d come to visit her, Joel and Omertà. A perfect, fitting day it had been, letting them say goodbye to their granddaughter one last time. And they`d both hugged the child and kissed her raven hair as if they`d known. Maybe they had.

Wednesday pauses in her reminiscence to bend and pick up a handful of earth to throw on the coffin.

"Adieu and Adios and don`t you _dare_ come back," She says firmly, letting the soil crumble between her fingers. Now there are some soft sobs and sniffles audible from the crowd. Pugsley smiles and nods in confirmation.

"Never ever," he adds.

No, never ever, her parents had earned to enter that land of eternal night, to exist surrounded by velvety darkness and love and each other for all eternity. In each other`s arms, like they had been when they found them. Wrapped around the other in a final paroxysm of pain born from devotion, fingernails digging deep into each other`s skin, implacable smiles on their faces. Wednesday had taken care that the poison would act slowly enough to let them realize what was about to happen. To give them time to hold each other as they embarked on that last journey into the dark together. Together as they had always been meant to be.

Wiping her hands on her dress, Wednesday watches her daughter gleefully hurl a handful of earth onto the coffin, the rain immediately washing it away.

"Can I play with Granny and Grandpa now?" Omertá asks ,her eyes already brimming with mischief again, and looking ready to simply leap onto the coffin.

Wednesday smiles for what must be the first time in weeks. In moments like these, there was so much of her father`s manic energy, of her mother`s charming callousness in Omertà already.

"No, my little magpie, not now."

"We`ll have to wait `til Halloween for that, won`t we?" Joel says, lifting their daughter into his arms.

"No fair, I want to play with them _now_ ," Omertá sulks.

"No, it`s not fair at all," Joel confirms, gently pinching his daughter`s cheek.

"I like that," Omertá giggles, returning the pinch quite violently.

That heartwarming spark of malice, Wednesday sees in her daughter, a spark that will undoubtedly burst into a singeing flame one day, it makes her so proud to be an Addams, standing here before her parent`s grave, knowing their dark bloodline will continue on. She rises on her tip-toes to kiss her daughter`s cheek. One day, she hopes _,_ this child will be the death of her too.


End file.
